Keeping you up to date at iRace.net.au

The Independent Race Series is always working to serve our competitors and fans in the most effective way possible. We try to innovate and capitalise on useful advances in technology that can make everyone's lives a little more streamlined.

When the site launched, we offered our news as a RSS Feed (click here for more information on how you can have every article delivered to your email program or other RSS reader).

We've started a mailing list and send regular updates to all our subscribers (subscribe here if you haven't been receiving the emails).

We've launched a fully featured Online Entry System that makes it easier for competitors to submit their entries, and makes life a little easier at our end by automatically putting all the entry information into a handy spreadsheet.

And now, we're ready to launch something else new. Live Updates. The iRace website has always been kept pretty well up-to-date, but race weekends are always a challenge to get new information on the site. This is a problem, because race weekends are what we are all about. Well, now we've introduced two ways to overcome this.

We now feature a live "photostream" on the front page of the site. There is only one photo there now, but that will change once the round gets underway. The most recent photos from the current round will appear in this section. And to view all the photos from the current round, go via the Multimedia page to the round in question and select the Live Photo Feed.

We'll also be adding short live news updates to the front page. We can send these in from a mobile phone, so trackside news should appear fairly regularly. The most recent items will appear on the front page, and to view them all, you can check out this link. If you already have a Twitter account, you can 'follow' iraceupdates and receive the news in your 'tweets'.

And if all this sounds like too much for you, you can relax, because all the regular news and updates will still happen. Round reports, and post-event news items will be available in the normal way.

So, get ready for the year ahead. And if there's anything else you'd like to see on iRace.net.au, you can always provide feedback through the Contact Us page.

Subscribe to the Independent Race Series

The internet is a hectic place. New websites spring up every day, and it can be hard to sort the wheat from the chaff. Most internet users have a collection of sites they visit regularly, but no way of knowing in advance if each of their favourite sites has been updated since they last visited. It can be time consuming to open up all your favourites only to find they haven't changed since the last time you looked.

What if there was a way to have any news items delivered automatically to your computer whenever you connected to the internet? Well, there is a way. And the Independent Race Series website (www.irace.net.au) has incorporated the technology in its design. The technology is called RSS (Really Simple Syndication), and it allows you to subscribe to a News "Feed", either through a program you may already be using (usually an email program or web browser), or through a dedicated program. Each time you connect to the internet, the program checks the status of the feed, and if there is a new article it can be automatically downloaded. For a full rundown on how it all works, and how you can subscribe, click HERE.

If you already know how to subscribe, the link you are looking for is: http://www.irace.net.au/news/files/blogRSS.php

There are a number of other little innovations incorporated in this website, and we'll bring you more information on how to get the most out of it soon.